Tuesday, September 26, 2006

'Home They Brought Her Warrior Dead'

The War Presidentand his 'Mission Accomplished' (May 1, 2003)

The president grieves in private. Maybe he does but I find it hard to believe just as I doubt the claim that this summer he read The Stranger by Albert Camus. The casualties mount and reports about the deception foisted upon the American public to sell the war in Iraq continue to surface. Latest numbers (U.S. Soldiers): September 1-25: 63 Total todate: 2705 When the president appeared on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, against the backdrop of a large banner reading 'Mission Accomplished' the U.S. casualties were 42. Then there was his "Bring them on" challenge to the insurgents on July 2, 2003. Since then 2498 soldiers have died in Iraq. Peter Baker in the Post: "FALMOUTH, Maine -- They sat on two frayed chairs in a teacher's lounge, the president and the widow, just the two of them so close that their knees were almost touching.She was talking about her husband, the soldier who died in a far-off war zone. Tears rolled down her face as she mentioned two children left fatherless. His eyes welled up, too. He hugged her, held her face, kissed her cheek. "I am so sorry for your loss," he kept repeating."

She told him she considers him responsible for her husband's death and begged him to bring home the troops. "It's time to put our pride behind us and stop the bleeding, for all of us," she recalled saying. The president demurred, unwilling to debate a mourning woman. "We see things differently," he said.

But Hildi Halley, a self-described liberal antiwar activist who met with President Bush in Maine last month, said she believes he felt her grief. "It wasn't just a crocodile tear," she said in an interview at her home. "I felt like I moved him. I don't think he's going to wake up tomorrow and say, 'Oh my gosh, I've been wrong this whole time and I'm going to change all my policies because of my meeting with this woman.' I just hope that with each soldier, he remembers my pain."

He has a lot of pain to remember. Now more than five years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush has served as a wartime president longer than any occupant of the White House since Lyndon B. Johnson. He has presided over more U.S. military casualties than any since Richard M. Nixon. While he travels the country defending his policy and arguing to stay the course in Iraq, he also confronts the human burdens of wartime leadership.

The two sides of Bush as commander in chief can be hard to reconcile. His public persona gives little sense that he dwells on the costs of war. He does not seem to agonize as Johnson did, or even as his father, George H.W. Bush, did before the Persian Gulf War. While he pays tribute to those who have fallen, the president strives to show resolve and avoid displays that might be seen as weak or doubting. His refusal to attend military funerals, while taking long Texas vacations and extended bicycle rides, strikes some critics as callous indifference.

Home they brought her warrior dead, is the title of a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson